Overview: Jorg Piringer’s Sound Poems create a dynamic relationship between letters and their phonetic representations. The three included poems initiate a discourse of the importance of sound in language, particularly in how it is crafted from the human throat (in these cases, digital computational sound) to a constructed system of communication. It is important to note that the sounds made from the "games" are not recordings of human sounds but digitized versions of the sounds created by those letter combinations. This further situates the role of the machine in the discourse of digital literature as a tool to potentially subvert the human.
Textual Features:
-No readability: no words; no sentences; no specific language is used here
-All letters are in the Latin alphabet--no Arabic, Asian, or Cyrillic letters are included
-“Message” is hypertextual
----Not linear
----Not bound in linguistic systems
--Doesn't seem to have any pattern to what vowel is dropped
Media Features:
-Flash
-Kinetic movement of letters
-Reader initiated
-Reader’s clicks prompt the letter movement
----“gravity and reflection”: clicks bear letters that plummet, recoil, and then bounce around erratically before eventually disappearing
----“predator vs. prey”: clicks and drags spur letters to pursue one another
----“food chain”: clicks “feed” floating letters that bounce off of each other after feeding
-Sound featured in relationship to kinetic activity
-Very User-friendly
-Black letters on a white background; no other color is seen anywhere on the screen
Reading Experience:
Because the reader is “involved” in the narration, there is a sense of control in the drama. We determine how many letter-sounds are out and when they appear. In “gravity and reflection” the reader may being experimenting with clicks, to see the letters fall and hear the sounds they generate when coming in contact with the bottom and sides of the white box. After this experimental phase, the reader can click rapidly, sending many letters tumbling and creating a cacophony of sound. In “predator vs. prey,” the ability to set letters “against” one another allows the reader to construct dynamic plays within the box. Again, the experimentation can be subtle, and/or can then proliferate to create a wide ecosystem. In “food chain,” the reader can place small letters in the path of or out of the way of larger “floating” letters that, encountering them, will “eat” them, resonating a sound and having the smaller letter disappear.
These poems are very User-friendly and incorporated the “play” aspect of digital literature while making commentaries on language and phonetics. No two readers’ experiences will be the same. Some may "read" the poem as song; others may complain about the racket created by the letters' interactions with each other and then mute the sound. While some of the experience is lost without sound, the fun one can have by clicking erratically and watching the letters move around is still present.
Analysis and Interpretation:
From the construction of an alphabet and the movement from oral to literate culture, the partnership of sound and letter/word/sentence/language became fundamental to human communication. In a complex linguistic system that has become background to our cognition of language, sound and its potentially playful nature is often not considered in literature (save, perhaps, for Slam or Oral poets and other forms of spoken-word literature). Piringer attempts to re-situate sound as a viable part of language by stripping language of its literate form and meaning, and demanding a consideration of letter phonetics, harkening back to language’s oral origins. In addition, arguments can be made for how these sound/letter pairings have deeper interpretive meanings without the use of systematic language.
In “gravity and reflection,” for example, the sound that occurs when a letter hits the bottom or sides of the walls loosely reflects the letter that falls. The subtleties of one or two letters “making their sounds” is trumped by the cacophony that occurs when the reader clicks erratically and a multitude of letters fall. It also brings to mind the cacophony created by multiple people trying to speak over each other, like when an argument occurs or when many people are in a small area like a mall's food court. Piringer seems to suggest how sound is integral to language and cannot be ignored, perhaps like gravity. The dissonance of the falling letters forces the reader to hear the “noise” more than pay attention to the letters or what they could “spell.” This situates the phonetic sound of letters as an important construct to communication.
In “predator vs. prey,” Piringer pits letters against one another but does so in a way that invokes a natural order. Predators and prey, being suggestive of nature and the natural progression of life feeding on life for an organism’s survival, demand that the reader considers the hierarchal relationship among species of animals. Because the “animals” in question are letters, the reader is forced to consider how letters—or more precisely, how letters function communally: languages—are ordered in similar hierarchies or constructions. While some letters "catch" others rather quickly, there are other occasions when one will circle another. This brings to mind (again) the hunt, where the predator circles its prey in order to create (or sustain) terror in its prey. An argument can be made that some languages (English, for example) are more globally appreciated in commerce, education, and communication, than others. Sounds accompany their respective letters as they “hunt” for one another, creating a jungle-esque soundscape indicative the animal world.
Similarly, in “food chain,” floating capital consonants of the Latin alphabet consume pellets of “food” the reader places in the “fish tank” of the white box. The food pellets in question are small, are all vowels, and include accents that do not appear in, say, English for example. All of them are given the umlaut (two small dots) over the vowel. As the consonants consume the food, they grow larger. They eventually get to the size of "proper" English capital letters. This could be a suggestion again that English is viewed as a “superior” language on the food chain on geopolitical linguistics.
Similarly, other popular languages (French, Spanish, Italian, for example) are hierarchally constructed to be superior than Asiatic or African language, which simply do not appear in the text. Interestingly, if the reader lets the text play out, eventually the letters will become sated after eating, and will leave the box, no matter how many pellets of letters the reader places. This may suggest the colonial/imperialistic nature of dominant cultures/language that take what is needed and leave. Sound plays an important role here, as the letter combinations make the exact sounds they would in speech when the food pellet letters are “eaten” by the consonants, drawing attention to the vowels being consumed.
http://collection.eliterature.org/2/works/piringer_soundpoems.html
Overview: Jorg Piringer’s Sound Poems create a dynamic relationship between letters and their phonetic representations. The three included poems initiate a discourse of the importance of sound in language, particularly in how it is crafted from the human throat (in these cases, digital computational sound) to a constructed system of communication. It is important to note that the sounds made from the "games" are not recordings of human sounds but digitized versions of the sounds created by those letter combinations. This further situates the role of the machine in the discourse of digital literature as a tool to potentially subvert the human.
Textual Features:
-No readability: no words; no sentences; no specific language is used here
-All letters are in the Latin alphabet--no Arabic, Asian, or Cyrillic letters are included
-“Message” is hypertextual
----Not linear
----Not bound in linguistic systems
--Doesn't seem to have any pattern to what vowel is dropped
Media Features:
-Flash
-Kinetic movement of letters
-Reader initiated
-Reader’s clicks prompt the letter movement
----“gravity and reflection”: clicks bear letters that plummet, recoil, and then bounce around erratically before eventually disappearing
----“predator vs. prey”: clicks and drags spur letters to pursue one another
----“food chain”: clicks “feed” floating letters that bounce off of each other after feeding
-Sound featured in relationship to kinetic activity
-Very User-friendly
-Black letters on a white background; no other color is seen anywhere on the screen
Reading Experience:
Because the reader is “involved” in the narration, there is a sense of control in the drama. We determine how many letter-sounds are out and when they appear. In “gravity and reflection” the reader may being experimenting with clicks, to see the letters fall and hear the sounds they generate when coming in contact with the bottom and sides of the white box. After this experimental phase, the reader can click rapidly, sending many letters tumbling and creating a cacophony of sound. In “predator vs. prey,” the ability to set letters “against” one another allows the reader to construct dynamic plays within the box. Again, the experimentation can be subtle, and/or can then proliferate to create a wide ecosystem. In “food chain,” the reader can place small letters in the path of or out of the way of larger “floating” letters that, encountering them, will “eat” them, resonating a sound and having the smaller letter disappear.
These poems are very User-friendly and incorporated the “play” aspect of digital literature while making commentaries on language and phonetics. No two readers’ experiences will be the same. Some may "read" the poem as song; others may complain about the racket created by the letters' interactions with each other and then mute the sound. While some of the experience is lost without sound, the fun one can have by clicking erratically and watching the letters move around is still present.
Analysis and Interpretation:
From the construction of an alphabet and the movement from oral to literate culture, the partnership of sound and letter/word/sentence/language became fundamental to human communication. In a complex linguistic system that has become background to our cognition of language, sound and its potentially playful nature is often not considered in literature (save, perhaps, for Slam or Oral poets and other forms of spoken-word literature). Piringer attempts to re-situate sound as a viable part of language by stripping language of its literate form and meaning, and demanding a consideration of letter phonetics, harkening back to language’s oral origins. In addition, arguments can be made for how these sound/letter pairings have deeper interpretive meanings without the use of systematic language.
In “gravity and reflection,” for example, the sound that occurs when a letter hits the bottom or sides of the walls loosely reflects the letter that falls. The subtleties of one or two letters “making their sounds” is trumped by the cacophony that occurs when the reader clicks erratically and a multitude of letters fall. It also brings to mind the cacophony created by multiple people trying to speak over each other, like when an argument occurs or when many people are in a small area like a mall's food court. Piringer seems to suggest how sound is integral to language and cannot be ignored, perhaps like gravity. The dissonance of the falling letters forces the reader to hear the “noise” more than pay attention to the letters or what they could “spell.” This situates the phonetic sound of letters as an important construct to communication.
In “predator vs. prey,” Piringer pits letters against one another but does so in a way that invokes a natural order. Predators and prey, being suggestive of nature and the natural progression of life feeding on life for an organism’s survival, demand that the reader considers the hierarchal relationship among species of animals. Because the “animals” in question are letters, the reader is forced to consider how letters—or more precisely, how letters function communally: languages—are ordered in similar hierarchies or constructions. While some letters "catch" others rather quickly, there are other occasions when one will circle another. This brings to mind (again) the hunt, where the predator circles its prey in order to create (or sustain) terror in its prey. An argument can be made that some languages (English, for example) are more globally appreciated in commerce, education, and communication, than others. Sounds accompany their respective letters as they “hunt” for one another, creating a jungle-esque soundscape indicative the animal world.
Similarly, in “food chain,” floating capital consonants of the Latin alphabet consume pellets of “food” the reader places in the “fish tank” of the white box. The food pellets in question are small, are all vowels, and include accents that do not appear in, say, English for example. All of them are given the umlaut (two small dots) over the vowel. As the consonants consume the food, they grow larger. They eventually get to the size of "proper" English capital letters. This could be a suggestion again that English is viewed as a “superior” language on the food chain on geopolitical linguistics.
Similarly, other popular languages (French, Spanish, Italian, for example) are hierarchally constructed to be superior than Asiatic or African language, which simply do not appear in the text. Interestingly, if the reader lets the text play out, eventually the letters will become sated after eating, and will leave the box, no matter how many pellets of letters the reader places. This may suggest the colonial/imperialistic nature of dominant cultures/language that take what is needed and leave. Sound plays an important role here, as the letter combinations make the exact sounds they would in speech when the food pellet letters are “eaten” by the consonants, drawing attention to the vowels being consumed.